SDP focuses on national politics with a special emphasis on South Dakota. It also includes posts on philosophy, science and culture. SDP was founded by Jason Van Beek, who stopped blogging after becoming a staffer for Sen. John Thune (R-SD) and is currently operated by Ken Blanchard.

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Bad Government

A lot of my colleagues on the left wing of the local blogosphere (well, Cory Heidelberger is still my friend!) defend ObamaCare as the best thing they can get, but what they really want is a single payer system. That is to say that they want the federal government to directly control the entire healthcare system. Okay. Does the federal government seem like a competent administrator just right now?

I seem to remember that Cory once pointed to the Veterans Administration as an example of good healthcare. If I remember incorrectly, I apologize. At any rate, we know now that the VA is a scandalous mess. Veterans waited for treatment and some of them died waiting while VA administrators cooked the books to show that they were promptly serving them and came down hard on whistle blowers. Don’t believe me. Believe this guy:

The Department of Veterans Affairs has lost the trust of veterans and the American people as a result of widespread treatment delays for people seeking health care and falsified records to cover up those delays, the agency’s top official said Wednesday.

Acting VA Secretary Sloan Gibson said the VA has created an environment where workers are afraid to raise concerns or offer suggestions for fear of retaliation and has failed to hold employees accountable for wrongdoing or negligence.

Wait! I typed too fast.

Despite its problems, Gibson said the VA can turn itself around “in as little as two years” if given additional resources by Congress.

Can anyone believe that? Give us more money to reward us for our failure and in two years we’ll be back on track.

Now: do you believe that the Department of Health and Human Services will do a better job of directing the American healthcare system? Forget about the goofy start of ObamaCare and all the parts of the law arbitrarily canceled or delayed by the Administration. Instead, consider this:

Federal officials can’t resolve 85 percent of 2.9 million “inconsistencies” on applications for ObamaCare even after nine months of trying, according to new data provided by the administration.

One unidentified state-run marketplace cited situations in which infants and young children were “erroneously identified as incarcerated, according to federal data,” the inspector general for the Health and Human Services Department revealed Tuesday.

Just 425,000 problematic applications have been resolved out of 2.9 million that states and the federal exchange reported, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services told The Post.

These folks don’t know their own asses from oatmeal and it isn’t their fault. This is ObamaCare as we have it. Can any sane person think that it would all be better if we could just put more power in the hands of federal bureaucracies?

Federal officials found more than just long-forgotten smallpox samples recently in a storage room on the National Institutes for Health campus in Bethesda, Md. The discovery included 12 boxes and 327 vials holding an array of pathogens, including the virus behind the tropical disease dengue and the bacteria that can cause spotted fever, according to the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees the lab in question.

“The fact that these materials were not discovered until now is unacceptable,” Karen Midthun, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), told reporters Wednesday. “We take this matter very seriously, and we’re working to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.”

The disclosure came hours after Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, testified on Capitol Hill that researchers at the agency mishandled live anthrax and other deadly pathogens in a string of mishaps in recent years. “We missed a critical pattern,” he told lawmakers. “And the pattern is an insufficient culture of safety.”

You have to admire that phrase “unacceptable”. It means that the agencies that are supposed to protect us against small pox and anthrax and “an array of pathogens, including the virus behind the tropical disease dengue and the bacteria that can cause spotted fever” are leaving this stuff around in zip lock bags where any fool or nave can get their hands on it.